


All Perishable Things

by goldfinch



Series: In Daylight or Darkness [2]
Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Box Tunnel 20, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Moving In Together, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 07:01:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6646936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All these years later, and Daisy’s just now realizing: Ivan didn’t make her indestructible. Not really. Long-lived, yes, but the way she felt before Pearl, and George, and the open mouth of the scissor blades—that wasn’t indestructibility, just dryness. The dusty remains of a life she’d half forgotten, withered clean away. Loss upon loss upon loss. Trying to fill the empty space with blood and new places until it felt like she had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Perishable Things

**Author's Note:**

> This is an alternate ending and continuation of _The Lilies of the Field_.

There was no point in waiting till dark to break in, not when the street was empty from one end of the block to the other. No cars, no people, nothing but a cat hunched up beneath the neighbor’s hedges, an orange thing with eyes like harvest moons and a hungry look. But besides that, Daisy knew Mitchell. She knew where he should be, and where he wasn’t. And once she got the door open, she knew where he was probably never going to be again. The curtains were closed and the air had a queer smell, dusty and shut-in, as though the place had been abandoned for weeks. A houseplant in the living room had gone brown and fragile and unwatered; a trail of ants curled round an uneaten plate of biscuits. Daisy wandered through the house, not touching anything, feeling only an acute sense of grief at this compounded loss.

It was what sent her to the police station, and then to the train station, and then to Barry Island.

“When I saw the blood still on your sheets, the same ones I fucked you under, I knew you weren’t coming back,” she tells him now, a fist of grass in one hand and Ivan’s lighter in the other, Mitchell himself sitting close enough to touch. “Not you, not George, not the ghost—not any of you.”

Not Ivan, either. That hangs in the air, unsaid; it drifts up into the cloudy sky over the park until it’s too far away to reach, until she can’t get it back to say it. But in her mind it overlaps with the empty rooms she came upon, Mitchell’s voice over the phone the night the funeral parlor was bombed, asking where she was, asking if she was okay. There had been a slide of mail on the floor when she finally got the door open. There were cups of tea abandoned on the kitchen counters. Mitchell didn’t take anything with him when he left, and his guitar, his books, his posters on the walls—everything was still there.

“You hadn’t even taken your clothes,” she says.

Mitchell’s head turns a wee bit to look at her. “It was—sudden. I should have left you a note, or called you or something.” Something in his face reminds her a bit of Ivan, in Italy, when he stood on a balcony near the Piazza Quindici Martiri and watched the riot pass beneath them. Even in April, Milan was warm.

“You should have told me when you went after those people,” she says. “I should have been there.”

“I know, but it was… it was complicated.”

“That's shite,” Daisy snaps. “One phone call—”

Mitchell leans toward her. “No, I’m serious. It wasn’t just vampires they were after—they had George and Annie and Nina too. The priest, he exorcised Annie, sent her to some sort of Purgatory.” He sighs, a long breath that takes ages to clear. “That night was—christ, Dais. It was a mess. I was a mess. I wasn’t thinking. When we got out, we went to the country. Lucy found us there, a couple weeks later. Then her boss found us.”

His voice is low, and Daisy can see when happened then, in those words, in the dark set of his jaw. He wouldn’t look that way if he’d pulled the woman close, if he’d looked her in the eye and opened his mouth. “You didn’t kill her, did you,” she says.

“No.”

The woman’s boss did. Which is hardly a surprise. Mitchell has always had a weak heart, too prone to sympathy and sentiment—but that same soft heart is how Daisy was able to find him here, living with George again and working as a hospital porter, so it has some uses. “You still loved her,” she says.

“Enough, yeah.” He doesn’t meet her eyes for a while after that, looking off toward the sea in the distance. They’re too far off to hear the waves, but Daisy can see the water, and the promenade, the food stalls and the people milling about with ice creams. All of them people she could kill and eat. But after she knelt over Ivan’s grave with her heart in her mouth and bled herself nearly dry for the second time that week—after she did that, and nothing happened, she killed a family of four in Bristol then cried herself to sleep in the master bedroom. She hasn’t killed anyone since then. There have been opportunities, but her hunger’s been low, and it’s seemed in poor taste with Ivan rotting in the ground.

Like she does, now, she closes her eyes and pictures his face. His fine nose, his thin lips, his cool flat shark’s eyes.

“Ivan and I were together over seventy years,” Daisy says slowly, turning a blue of grass between her fingers. “But now I just keep thinking about the way he looked when we watched Mussolini get strung up in the square. They didn’t do it as an insult, you know, although plenty of people said later that they did. It was to protect him. To protect the body. Even after everything he did, there were still people out there who loved him.”

When she looks up, Mitchell’s staring at her with an unfamiliar softness, a look Daisy doesn’t want to examine further. “Come stay with me for a few days,” he says suddenly.

Daisy closes her eyes. The air is clean and cool, salt from the bay and—there must be a bakery nearby, because she smells bread. With her eyes closed, the sun feels almost pleasant.

“Maybe." She already knows she means yes.

 

 

 

The inside of the house is both open and cramped at once. The long hallway twists up into a staircase and then opens up into the living room; she spends a couple seconds staring at the mural, trying not to burst into laughter. “This is worse than your old place,” she says, sliding him an amused look. Mitchell tosses his keys down on the coffee table and, seeing what she’s looking at, grins.

“I know,” he says, “it’s awful, right? George wants us to have a barbecue out back one weekend and dance the hula.”

She can imagine it. Even when Mitchell has that look on his face, she can imagine it. The room is long and open and well lit, with plenty of space between the bar and the opposite wall. Daisy lifts herself up onto one of the stools, swings her legs a bit. It makes her feel unaccountably young. “How is he, anyway?”

“George?” Mitchell shrugs. “He’s fine. He and Nina are doing well, so.” He leans round the bar, looking up the stairs. “Annie! You here?”

“What can I do ya for, Guv’na?” It’s not anything like the accent Daisy expected, more low-class sing-song than anything she’s heard outside prison visiting rooms since fifty years ago, but the ghost girl herself looks exactly like Daisy thought she would. Curly brown hair, brown skin, a grin that looks both plastered on and completely honest. The moment she sees Daisy, though, it shifts into flustered embarrassment—and the accent changes too, sliding abruptly into an equally cheery standard English. “Oh, hi! Sorry, sorry, I didn’t realize there’d be guests. I’m Annie, Mitchell’s housemate.”

“Daisy.” She takes Annie’s hand, squeezes it just to check—and oh, the girl’s definitely a ghost. Ivan always said Mitchell kept odd company, but this—she almost laughs. “Well, aren’t you something.”

Annie’s smile falters a bit. “Sorry?”

“Hey, when’s George due back?” Mitchell asks. 

Annie shrugs, turns toward him instead. “His shift ends at four today—Nina’s popped down to Tesco, but she shouldn’t be long either. Did you—were you wanting to….” She makes an indecipherable gesture between him and Daisy, but Mitchell seems to understand. He shrugs.

“For a bit, anyway, yeah.”

“Oh! Well, lovely. I’ll go rustle up some biscuits, shall I?” She turns toward a pair of double doors, with two high windows in them like doors to a surgery. Through them Daisy can see a stretch of wallpaper and not much else—Annie vanishes with a ghost’s usual abruptness, not using the doors at all, but something clangs inside a moment later. It must be the kitchen.

“Well,” Daisy says, turning a sly-eyed look toward Mitchell. “Werewolves, ghosts—you haven’t got anything hiding up in the attic, have you?”

“We did have a zombie for a couple days,” Mitchell says, and his face is so casually disinterested that Daisy just rolls her eyes. “I mean it,” Mitchell says. “Something to do with when Annie was on the other side, I dunno.”

“You’ll have to tell me about it.” She leans to snag a bottle of something from behind the bar. Wine. Hm. She uncorks it and swallows a mouthful straight from the bottle, thin and sweet, but with a bitter finish. It’s not blood, of course, but she picked up a taste for it when she and Ivan were in Italy, in the months after Mussolini’s death. She pours herself a glass without asking for permission, and even after she’s put the bottle away and taken another experimental sip, Mitchell’s moved not at all from where she left him. “Did you want some?” she asks, tipping a finger toward her glass.

Mitchell shakes his head. “You can have a seat,” he adds, nodding to the armchair. “It might be a while, even once George and Nina get here.”

Oh really. “I thought you said it was a done deal.”

“They’ll agree eventually, it’ll just take some convincing.” He gives her a brief, uncertain look. “I’ll probably have to tell them about Ivan.”

All the wine’s sweetness has suddenly gone from her mouth, but Daisy takes another swallow. Drains the glass, then slides it away from her across the bar. “Fine.” She tries to say it like it doesn’t bother her, but of course it does. The idea of other people knowing, of Mitchell laying out her loss for his housemates and telling them that he owes her nearly makes her want to dry heave into the wineglass. It makes her want to leave. But she doesn’t have anywhere else to go, and she chose this, or let Mitchell choose for her. So she shuts her mouth and says nothing.

Neither of them say anything at all, actually, until the kettle begins to whistle in the kitchen, and then Annie bustles into the room with a service tray, on it four cups and a plate of biscuits. Mitchell doesn’t sit up when she comes into the room, but his eyes light up a bit. “Coffee?” he asks hopefully.

Annie smiles at him, radiant. “Hm-hm! Now,” she says to Daisy, laying the service on one of the side tables, “I didn’t know what you liked, so I’ve made camomile, English breakfast, Earl grey, and then a lovely herbal blend George picked up a few days ago, I don’t know what’s in it—hibiscus, maybe? Just pick whichever you like, and George and Nina can drink what’s left over.”

Daisy leans to peer into the mugs. “You’d have done beautifully in service.” She means it to be sarcastic, but Annie only looks pleased.

“You know, I did work as bar staff for a bit. Nothing fancy, just this place round the corner, but I was wonderful; everyone said so.”

“Mm.” Daisy picks up the Earl grey, sips on it experimentally. It’s not bad. Better than she expected. Mitchell leans forward to take the coffee and then flops back into the couch. “Oh hey.” He’s looking across the living room, toward the window facing the front of the house. The front door opens a few seconds later, so obviously whoever it is lives here, or at least has keys. But it's no one she knows. It's a woman, short, compact, in terrible white hospital shoes and a coat that’s probably hiding scrubs.

“Hi,” the woman says slowly, laying her bag down next to the coat rack. She looks at Mitchell. “Friend of yours?”

“Uh, yeah, this is Daisy. Daisy, Nina. George’s girlfriend,” he adds, when Daisy glances at him. He’s still flung back deep in the couch, but there’s a watchful look in his eyes.

“Charmed,” she says. Nina’s smile is polite but guarded; Daisy can’t read much at all in her face. But behind her, through the window, she can see a shadow coming up the walk. She hasn’t seen George in months, but she still knows it’s him somehow: the shape of his head, the way he walks, like he’s constantly worried about something. When he comes through the door, he stops dead.

“Uh,” he says. 

Daisy raises one eloquent eyebrow, and after a moment George’s girlfriend puts it together. “You two know each other too?” Nina asks.

“Oh, uh—yeah, she and her husband, um—Mitchell and I, uh—met them, a couple months ago. In Bristol.”

He couldn’t be any more obvious if he tried, and Nina clearly doesn’t believe that’s the whole story because her face goes curiously blank, curiously wary, and she tells George that Mitchell has invited Daisy to stay with them for a few days, and what does he think about that?

“Guys,” Mitchell says, looking from George to Nina and back and then to Daisy, “how bout we take this into the kitchen. Come on.” He pushes George through the double doors, Nina going ahead of them. Mitchell doesn’t look back, but once the doors shut he’s the only one Daisy can still see, through a large rectangular cutout in the wall like a service counter at a diner. She wishes she could see George too though, because his voice is the only one that ever rises high enough to hear what he’s saying. “—What else am I supposed to say?” and “—not the only—” Mitchell’s voice never rises at all, but he does most of the talking in the beginning. He drags a hand across his mouth and doesn’t look at her and by the end of it, everyone is silent.

Mitchell meets her eyes through the open wall of the bar, and then he’s pushing the double doors open and walking toward her. His face is pale and set, like a mask. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s get you settled.”

Her fate, apparently, has been decided. 

She doesn’t have any things of her own—what she and Ivan would do was toss the houses of whoever they killed that day; even now Daisy’s wearing someone else’s dress, someone else’s socks. It makes traveling so much simpler. But when Mitchell opens the door to the room she’ll be staying in, she’s struck by how empty it is. There are two twin beds, a bare dresser, an empty fireplace. The wallpaper isn’t bad but there’s nothing on the walls, no knickknacks on the mantel, no photos beside the bed—and she has nothing of her own to put there. Worse, the room smells like dog. “Who stayed here last?” she asks, covering her nose.

“Uh, some werewolves George and Nina met. It smells, I know.” He pauses, then: “If you want—”

“Yeah, I’m not staying here.”

Mitchell’s room is miles better. It’s a mess, but full of things; it looks lived in. He has posters up on more wall space than he had in Bristol, and a good bed, clothes thrown all over the floor, books, comics she doesn’t recognize. A painting of a ship hangs above the mantle, sea-green and calm. “Sorry,” Mitchell says. He bends to collect some of the dirty laundry. “I’ll—clean up a bit. Gimme a minute.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “I’ve seen worse.”

It will certainly be better than waking up covered in blood. However good it tastes, it’s a bitch to get off her skin in the shower once it’s dried, especially in her scalp. Her red hair makes it less noticeable than it could be, but it itches. Mitchell, she suspects, knows that well.

But he ignores her, shoving his scattered clothes into a hamper and straightening the piles of things shoved up against the walls. When he’s done he sort of drifts to a stop, like he’s not sure what to do next. Daisy watches him start picking at one of his gloves. There’s that softness in his face again, so tender Daisy has to look away. “I’m glad you’re here, you know,” he says.

“Not like I had anywhere else to go, is it.”

“Still. You know I never…. I hope you can be happy.”

Daisy stares at him, at his carved-in suffering and tangled hair, and says, finally, as dryly as she can, “Has this place made you happy? Cause babe, I’ve got to be honest: you look like shite.”

“It’s… it hasn’t got anything to do with this place.”

“What, then?”

His face changes, then, with a readiness that makes Daisy wonder if no one’s ever asked him what was wrong before. “C’mere.” He explains it sitting with one leg pulled up, the other dangling off the edge of the bed. Daisy’s cross-legged, and as Mitchell speaks he shifts closer, so close their knees are almost touching. To get Annie out of Purgatory, he had to pay a price. His eventual death at the hands of a werewolf. “And now suddenly there’s two fucking more of them running about—actual vampire _hunters_ , those two bastards are, and I can’t—I mean I’m going mental, Dais, I am, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do. I mean—I can’t just up and leave.”

“Why not?” She’s honestly curious. “It’s the easiest choice. Clean. Simple.” It was how she and Ivan lived, moving from one place to the other, not running from the people they killed but not sticking round for the aftermath either. There was always something else to see, somewhere else to go. She’s seen the pyramids and the bombing of the bridge in Mostar; she’s seen the last _gjakmarrja_ come to its bloody end and the beginning of the civil war in Libya. She has witnessed the rise and fall of dictators, the advent of the internet and the atomic bomb; she has seen more death than anyone today with a heartbeat, but as much as she’s seen, Mitchell’s seen more. And somehow this is where he’s chosen to be, after everything. This big house in Wales, with creaky stairs and a mural of paradise in the living room.

“I can’t,” Mitchell says. He’s not looking at her anymore, but at the closed bedroom door. It’s thin enough. Daisy can hear George and his girlfriend talking in the room down the hall, but then they’re not doing a great job of keeping their voices down. “You said earlier that there was a way to bring someone back,” Mitchell says slowly. “Herrick told me that once too but he didn’t say—” He cuts himself off, looks her in the eye. “How did you do it?”

The cloudy sky. The lightheaded cold that came over her, bleeding out over Ivan’s grave in the snow. Daisy shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. It didn’t work with Ivan and it didn’t work with Herrick, and it wouldn’t work with you, either.”

“Wait—Herrick?”

“That woman Cara, she said she’d show me if I helped her. That’s how I found out there was any way at all. But it… Mitchell, it didn’t _work_.” How to explain the horror of that first moment, when Herrick clawed his way free of his grave still screaming? It wasn’t even out of pain, because there was nothing but mindless animal shock in his face. He didn’t understand anything Cara said; he couldn’t even speak. “He was _wrong_ when he came back, and I was glad it didn’t work with Ivan, because to come back the way Herrick had—it wouldn’t have been any real life kind of life. Certainly no life you’d want, even if it were your only choice. I’m serious, Mitchell,” she says, catching the look in his eyes.

The laugh that comes out of him then is harsh and broken-sounding, high with an edge of hysteria. “So what,” he says, “I’m just supposed to lie on my back and let those bastards kill me, am I?”

“No, you just don’t fucking die. Are you a hundred and twenty or a babe in arms? Don’t you have a brain in that thick skull of yours? Or is it another weak heart up there, just like the one in your chest? Stop obsessing.” She leans forward to press a kiss against his lips, open-mouthed but quick, instinctive. When she pulls back it’s only a wee bit, too close to see the flecks of color in his eyes but far enough to see the shape of his mouth when he sighs. “One day at a time.”

He stares at her, silent, breathing against her mouth. Eventually he laughs a wee bit and shakes his head. “That’s terrible advice.”

 

 

 

George is waiting for her when she comes downstairs the next morning, so late it’s almost noon. Well—waiting. That implies a sense of purpose or determination. Really he's hovering in the kitchen, half trying to look like he’s cleaning up, half trying to look like he’s going to walk out of the room at any minute. She sees him first through the service window, looking so ill at ease that she has to stop and watch. It’s like passing an accident on the motorway. Traffic slows to a crawl.

When she finally goes in, he doesn’t even see her. She crosses her arms, leans casually against the wall. “You do a better ghost than the actual ghost,” she says, smirking, “lurking round the dish rack like that.”

He whirls round, looking startled. “What? No, I just—can I—um, have a word, please?”

She sits at the table, makes a grand gesture toward the other chair, but he doesn’t take it. He does come closer, though, glancing nervously toward the doors.

He says, “It’s just, I’m with Nina now, and it’s serious, and as much fun as we had I don’t think it’s the best—idea—” He moves his hands, vigorously but mysteriously. “That is, I would really, very much appreciate it if—”

 _Oh._ Daisy has to laugh, the sound loud and raucous in the small kitchen. This place, with its porcelain mugs and its cheap silverware, is nowhere she ever thought she would find herself. When Ivan led her out of that bunker more than sixty years ago, she didn’t even know what he was. But when she woke, and the world was clear and bright and silver-sharp, and everyone she looked at made her hungry, she saw the length and breadth of her life laid out before her, endless and lovely as a dream. She has seen terrible things, over the course of her life. She’s seen great things too. But she’d never expected this… domesticity, or the pettiness of a one-night stand. In the past, she always left before there was ever the chance for things to get awkward. In the past, she mostly killed the men she slept with. 

“Don’t worry,” she says, smirking, head tilted back. “I won’t say a word. And I won’t jump you in the hall on your way to the loo or anything either, though we both know you’d like it.”

He sputters, and she feels her smirk stretch into a smile. She doesn’t care if she sleeps with him or not. She certainly never loved him, and any desire she felt for him died with Ivan—no, earlier: the moment he pulled out of her in the forest; the moment before he stood up. After that she had everything from him she would ever want. Now, when Daisy looks at him, what she thinks of first is when she was crouched like a nightmare on her daughter’s chest, and George talked her out of pressing in the sharp edge of the scissors.The look on his face, then. The way she almost cried. 

It’s not something she wants to repeat.

But it’s fun to tease him and watch him stumble; she likes the flush that turns the tips of his ears red. “I would _not_ like it,” he says, and stares at her, horrified, for a moment longer. But the expression fades, and then he lowers his head and starts fiddling with his glasses, in what is obviously a nervous habit. “I also wanted to say I’m… sorry about your husband. Mitchell told us a bit about what happened.”

Daisy curls her hand round the table edge. Ivan’s death is an old wound now, cold but still aching; she grits her teeth, and digs her fingers in until—there. There’s the pain again, hard and bright. “Wasn’t it you who said he only wanted someone to fuck?”

His mouth snaps shut and, watching the shock and uncertainty that comes over his face then, Daisy wonders if he forgot he said that. If he only said it to save Pearl’s life. If it wasn’t true, then what he said about Pearl wasn’t true either—not that it matters now. But George doesn’t tell her one way or the other, just arranges his face into something more composed, and closes his eyes. “I am sorry,” he says, but it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself.

Behind him, she hears the front door open, a familiar scrape of boots. Mitchell’s home. She stares at George’s face until she can’t stand it anymore, then peels herself up from the chair and stands, and moves past him, close enough to clip his shoulder with her own. “Whatever.”

Through the double doors, past the Hawaiian mural, across the living room. Mitchell’s just tossing down his keys, but Daisy leans down and snatches them up again. She presses them against his chest.

“What’s up?” he asks, looking over her shoulder toward the kitchen. “What’s happened?”

“Nothing. Come on, let’s go somewhere.”

He hesitates, still half turned round, but by the time she’s through the front door he’s right behind her. Daisy slides into the passenger seat of his car, the same black thing he’s been driving since the ‘50s. She doesn’t bother to take a look round, too angry and upset to do much other than stare out the window, turning one of her rings round and round on her finger. When Mitchell shuts his door, closing them in, it only makes her feel more trapped.

“Daisy—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. “Will you please just drive.”

He goes down unfamiliar streets, all the way through town—really just driving. They pass a row of shops, and an arcade, and the waterfront, where waves lap at the shore and seagulls hang suspended out in the air, so clean they look like they were cut from a different, whiter sky. They pass the park Mitchell took her to only yesterday. It seems ages ago, now. Ivan seems ages ago. When Mitchell finally stops the car, most of the grief and anger has gone out of her and she’s sitting in a parking lot near the promenade. The beach and the promenade itself are almost crowded, people taking advantage of the warmer weather. She can hear them talking. Laughing. The churn of humanity.

“What’s this?” she asks.

But Mitchell’s already pulling the keys from the ignition; he’s already climbing out of the car. “Come on,” he says, leaning back in. “I thought you liked to see new things.”

Let’s see the world and fuck. Can you think of a better way to spend your life?

She gets out of the car. 

The air is cool, the wind brisk but not strong. She still has to hold her hair back to keep it from flying into her eyes. Mitchell tilts his head down the promenade, toward nothing, toward the end where the way turns, and the beach goes on until it can’t. They walk, and the last of the anger seeps out of her, replaced by a thin tiredness. Bloodshot eyes and coffee cups nested into more coffee cups in the bin. The night Ivan died, she walked the city until dawn, not hunting, not remembering, just suddenly unable to stay in the room he’d paid for or sleep in the bed he’d slept in. She bought the flowers from a gas station. The loose police tape across the entrance of the funeral home, still wet from the fire hose, stuck to her palm.

She walks at Mitchell’s side, not looking at him. Together they pass a man selling sugar chestnuts. They pass families with children, and gaggles of teenagers, and young lovers holding hands. She likes it better than the mural in Mitchell’s living room, and not just because it’s real. It smells a bit, and it’s colder; there are too many people walking past. It isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t try to be. It doesn’t feel like a lie she’s complicit in whenever she looks at it.

“After Ivan died, after that bitch Cara—I went to see my daughter. Pearl.” She has to drag the words from her chest like swallowed silk, hand over hand, laboriously. Her lost daughter, abandoned, who’d nevertheless pulled herself up from the dirt and gone on. She’d married, had grandchildren; she’d lived a good life, and—“I watched her die. There were all these people there—her family, I suppose, grandchildren and what have you. Everyone except me.”

“You couldn’t have gone, Dais.”

“But I wanted to.” How to make him understand how badly she wanted it. She wanted Pearl to give her life meaning again, the way she had when Daisy let her live. Only Pearl didn’t live. And that was Daisy’s fault too. “I didn’t feel different, afterward; there was just more of the same sucking grief I’d felt ever since Ivan died, all-consuming as a black hole. I wish George—if he hadn’t talked me out of killing her in the first place—” 

“It’s not his fault,” Mitchell says, a wee bit sharply. “That was the right thing to do.”

“She’s dead anyway; what does it matter?”

“You made a choice—you made the _right_ choice. That matters, Daisy.”

She looks away because it’s easier, out over the wrinkled surface of the bay and the sea beyond it. Ivan’s lighter tips precariously between her fingers, but she doesn’t let it fall. A wave heaves itself up toward the lowering sky, grey and small and just like the one that came before it. She didn’t tell Ivan why she felt different, after George talked her out of killing Pearl—but then, he hadn’t asked.

“I thought I could go back,” she says slowly. She tilts Ivan’s lighter to the left, then to the right. “I thought I wanted to.”

“I mean you can’t, I guess. But you can move forward.” He looks at her, a sidelong glance that sticks and holds. “You know? We live such long lives that I think sometimes we forget what it means to want things. There’s so much history, all of it weighing us down.” 

She smirks out at the water, at the horizon, blurry and uncertain. “You’ve always been such a hopeless optimist.”

“Maybe.” He’s standing close enough that she can feel him shrug. “Ivan was too, though. He believed in things. In love… in you.”

“I know.”

But he’s gone now, him and Pearl both; now she has to forge her own way. But she knows how to do that. It’s no imposition. Daisy clenches her fists until her rings squeak together, and then keeps squeezing. Then she turns and moves away from the water.

 

 

 

Mitchell and George both work that evening, leaving Daisy to an awkward dinner with Nina and Annie in uncomfortable kitchen chairs. She doesn’t mind it. She puts her head down and eats in silence, puts away one plate of pasta and then another. She’s hungry. She’s been hungry for ages, since she woke up in bed with Mitchell back in Bristol. The only thing she can think of, when she bothers considering it at all, is that maybe it’s something to do with her unexpected abstinence, that the body needs something to keep it going, and if it isn’t blood…. 

Another half helping of pasta. A roll, then butter.

Annie does the dishes, refusing the offer of help Daisy doesn’t give; Nina sits across the table, slowly finishing a glass of water. So slowly, in fact, that Annie’s done with the dishes before Nina’s finished. Daisy doesn’t get up. Half because there’s nowhere else to go except Mitchell’s room, empty and quiet; half because she’s curious what Nina has to say that’s put such a look in her eyes. Once Annie’s popped off somewhere, Nina tips her glass to one side and then the other and then, finally, finally, opens her mouth.

“Why come here?” Her voice is polite enough, but there’s a stiff readiness to her, to her spine, her mouth, her uplifted chin, that puts Daisy in mind of a small, muscular dog. “You’ve been round since the 1940s; surely you’ve got other friends.”

She doesn’t have other friends, though. She and Ivan never stayed anywhere long enough to make them, although they had acquaintances, people they saw when they were in town in Moscow, Sarajevo, Tripoli, Saigon. But they were drinking companions; people to go out with. She wouldn’t call them friends. She wouldn’t even call Mitchell a friend, except that Ivan gave his life to save him. What exactly that makes him now, Daisy isn’t sure.

“My husband died to save him. That still means something to me,” she says. And it’s true. It’s truer than she meant to be with Nina, who has such stubborn watchfulness in her eyes. Daisy gives her a mocking, sardonic look and adds, “But maybe you think it shouldn’t. You don’t seem have a very high opinion of us.” 

“I can’t have very high opinions of murderers.”

Daisy shrugs. “Comes with the territory,” she says, and then says what she told Mitchell, in the vast emptiness of that abandoned church in Bristol: “You can’t be a vampire without drinking blood, just like you can’t be a werewolf without turning into a wolf once a month. It’s part and parcel of the thing you are now and you, hon, you know firsthand there’s nothing you can do to change that.” She’s got her feet under her now, and leans across the table toward Nina. “There’s no science that can help you, no prayers. No white chamber clean as the full moon till your insides turn it red.” 

Nina flinches. Daisy can see her breathing, harder than she’d been before; she can see her anger and her fear, but Nina’s voice, when she speaks, is tightly calm. “He told you about that, did he?”

Daisy sits back, smirking. Mitchell told her a lot of things the first day she was here, and that was one of the first: the facility, the scientist, the priest, the acolytes with their signs and Bibles, boys Mitchell bled dry and loaded into body bags. Daisy’s never been to that underground place, with its flickering lights and dry, underground mustiness, but she feels as though she has. She can picture the room of coffins, the row of doors, each of them leading to one of Mitchell’s regrets. “Hon, he told me everything. Did George tell you everything?”

Unexpectedly, this makes Nina smile. “I know you slept with him.”

But that’s hardly a surprise. And Daisy’s practiced at this sort of thing anyway. She drops a lump of sugar into her tea and stirs. “Mm. Just the once though, I’m afraid. How’d you find out?” She looks up, smirks. “I bet he told you.”

But Nina shakes her head. “No,” she says, “it’s your perfume. I’ve smelled it before. Werewolf nose, you know.” She sips from her glass. The control that’s settled back over her face slips into something softer, something more thoughtful and distracted-looking. She looks down into her tea, the first time since she’s come into the room that she hasn’t been looking at Daisy. “I don’t hold it against him. We were separated at the time; things were… difficult. They’re better now. Still.” Her eyes flick up. “Don’t make it twice.”

There’s hardly any danger of that, but Daisy doesn’t say so. Instead she smiles.

 

 

 

It comes back on her a few days later, when Mitchell invites her grocery shopping. Invites. Really he tells her he’s going round to Tesco and that she’s coming with him. It’s only a short drive there, so there’s no chance to talk about anything except the arsehole in front of them who keeps slamming on his brakes. There’s no chance to talk about anything going in, either. But in the breakfast foods section, Mitchell picks up a box of English Breakfast and tells her, “You’ve gotta stop winding them up.”

“How do you mean?”

Mitchell puts the tea back on the shelf. “I mean your conversation with Nina. And whatever you said to George. I know, I know—” he puts up his hands; it looks like surrender, but it isn’t—“you’ve…. I know what you’ve been through. But christ, Dais. I have to live with these people.”

Daisy rolls her eyes. She’s never lived with anyone except Ivan and her first husband, and her parents before that; she had terrible rows with her first husband, and her parents understood her about as well as she understood Pearl, but Ivan appreciated her humor; he liked her fierceness, her capacity for cruelty. And she lived with Ivan for seventy years. It’s hard to change after seventy years of anything. It’s even harder to want to. And if Mitchell expects her to change for a couple of werewolves, he’s even more idealistic than she thought.

“I’m living with them too, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Dais.” He catches her arm, pulls her so that she’s facing him—then his hand slips down to her waist. “I’m serious. They’re my friends.”

But it’s more than that; she can see it in his face now, and she’s been seeing it in his actions since she started living with him. It’s written into the hunch of his shoulders, and the unhappy set of his mouth. These are the lengths he goes to tear himself to pieces. “You think they’re so much better than you,” she says. “Why?”

He gives her a baffled look. “Because they… they just _are_.”

“Because they drew different cards in the supernatural pick-up game? Because God _loves them more?_ ”

“Because I’ve _killed_ people. Because _we’ve_ killed people. Daisy, there has to be something better than what we’ve been told is all there is; there has to be—”

“Love?” She means it to be mocking, but it comes out sounding almost desperate. She’s not thinking of Mitchell, then; she’s thinking of Ivan. Of Pearl when she was a baby, silent and trusting even as Daisy turned away, without a backward glance, from where Pearl lay on the woolen bedcover. She’s thinking of the silent, desecrated faces of the Sphinxes, of the thousands of years they have waited.

“Or something,” Mitchell says. “I don’t know, Dais, I don’t have all the answers, I just—” His hand on her tightens and then goes gentle. “I just….” 

They’re standing in the breakfast foods section of Tesco, surrounded by boxes of hotcake mix and cereal and tea, and desire’s come roaring through her like the sea. She wants to fuck him, wants to fuck him standing up, with her legs wrapped round his waist and her nails dug into his shoulders. She hasn’t fucked anyone in weeks. The look she gives him is, she thinks, unmistakeable. 

“You just?” Even her voice sounds different.

Mitchell’s eyes go black.

Three seconds after they get the car door open, Daisy’s pulling down her pants in the cramped backseat, Mitchell’s mouth wet and soft against hers. Their bags spill out onto the pavement as he climbs in after her; she hears the boxes falling, the rustle of thin plastic. And she feels warm—hot, even, as though she’s holding burning coals on her tongue. Her whole mouth is a well of heat and so she opens it wider, trying to pour the heat into Mitchell, who presses himself still closer. It’s a simple, animal thing: her desire, his desire—but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels dangerous. She knots her fingers in Mitchell’s hair and groans when he groans, opening her mouth again afterward when he kisses her. She has one foot braced against the rear window, the other down in the footwell; she can feel him breathing against her neck.

He doesn’t move off her right away. But eventually he does sit up, pulling a cigarette from the front pocket of his undone shirt. He offers her one, and she takes it; he lights hers, then his own. His hair’s a mess. He looks less freshly fucked and more like someone’s dragged him backward through a hedge in the rain. “Listen, Dais,” he says eventually. “What I said earlier, about George and Nina and you….”

But she’s not looking at him. She’s already rolling over, already pulling on her pants. “Whatever.”

 

 

 

She knows Mitchell has told George they fucked because George starts looking at her differently the next day. Less like she might eat him alive, more like he wants to smile at her. Nina treats her differently too, and Daisy resents this most of all, the implication that sleeping with someone can make anything better, or even change it. Except that it does. She feels, if not more at home in the house, then more welcome. More as though she belongs. And she feels too as though she’s wallowing in tar, on the verge of suffocating.

She sleeps in Mitchell’s room, but they don’t fuck again. He gets up even earlier than she does; sometimes he never goes to bed at all, and one morning she comes downstairs to find him in the living room, reading. She fell asleep early last night and is groggy and ill-tempered with sleep, still wearing all her rings, her hair a tangled mess about her shoulders. He smiles a wee bit when he sees her, and she wants to feel his teeth crunch beneath her fist.

“Morning.”

“Daisy!” Annie’s exclamation sounds neither particularly welcoming nor particularly pleased; Daisy wonders, bitterly amused, if she and Mitchell have been talking.

Mitchell lays the book open across his thigh, spine up, something with a blue cover and a title in blocky white font. Modern. 80s, maybe 90s. _The—_

“Did you want some?” Mitchell asks, lifting his mug a wee bit. He’s sitting loose-limbed in the armchair, the window shade half open behind him. It’s early. The light’s still cold and grey-seeming, and there’s a quiet to the house and the street outside that says it’s earlier than she’d thought it was. Maybe seven; maybe even six.

She tilts her head toward the kitchen, drawls, “Annie, make me a coffee, would you love?”

Something clanks behind the doors: porcelain and silverware. It makes Daisy smile to imagine Annie muttering angrily to herself, shoving the mugs and spoons about on the countertop. She’s transparent even for a ghost. A few moments later Annie swans out through the portal doors, a mug of coffee held in one hand. She sets it neatly down on the low table, her smile sweet and soft and utterly, utterly false. Daisy smiles back. And then Annie’s gone.

Daisy reaches for the mug.

“Careful,” Mitchell says dryly, “she might’ve poisoned it.”

She hasn’t of course—she doesn’t have it in her, as much as she’d like to think that she does—but Daisy doesn’t drink anyway. Just lays a hand fingertip by fingertip over the rim of the mug, then raises one sly eyebrow. “She fancies you, you know. It’s clear as day.”

Mitchell turns, choking on his coffee. Annie’s gone now, but he still glances into the kitchen before letting his mug hit the table. “I know,” he says, half groaning. “George pointed it out a few days ago. I don’t know what to do about it.”

Daisy shrugs. “Say yes?”

Mitchell’s gaze then is unexpectedly sharp, like laying your palm against the edge of a knife. “Why?”

Daisy raises an eyebrow. She has never in her life backed away from anything—not her parents, not the war, not the man with the gun she met in Syria, who pointed it at her and told her to kneel. “She’s pretty, in her way,” she tells Mitchell. “Good hair, good teeth. All the personality of a wet towel, but maybe that’s your thing.”

“She’s the kindest person I know.” He’s not offended, only chiding. Careful. Like he was back in Bristol, trying to talk everyone into something resembling human lives. Like he knew so much better than anyone else. Of course that was before he learned that vampires, like humans, respond best to shows of force, public executions in the town square, bodies drawn and quartered, like the Italians had done for centuries. It’s a lesson he seems to have done his best to forget, which is especially strange considering how much he lost in the explosion. Not as much as Daisy herself, of course, but enough that she would have thought he’d remember what led him there.

“And what has kindness ever gotten _you_?”

“Dais….” He looks at her, then away. “Look, I do care about her, and if things were different, maybe, but—well there was all that werewolf shite, wasn’t there, and then….”

Daisy traces the edge of her cup. Her rings make singing, metallic noises against the porcelain. Mitchell’s quiet, and then he keeps being quiet, gaze sliding away from hers and landing, eventually, somewhere on the table in front of him. Wherever Annie is now in the house, Daisy can’t hear her. “What,” she says.

“Well then you came along, didn’t you?” He says the words quickly, embarrassed, not quite able to look her in the eye. “And, I don’t know, it just seems like the time for it’s passed. If there ever was a time for it.” He shrugs then, gives her a wry look. “Missed my window for that too, I guess.”

“No. The two of you have all the time in the world, if you want it.”

He shakes his head. “It’d just be hiding again and—I don’t want to hide anymore, Dais; I don’t. I know what I am. Christ. I always have.”

“Acceptance is the first step.”

“Oh, don’t fucking—come on.”

His eyes are dark and shining in the hollows of his face, and she knows what he’s trying to say, she does—she’s heard the same things from men for over eighty years. But she can’t say yes. It feels too final. She would trap herself here, in the saying of it; this house would become her cage. All her life she’s been going from place to place, wanting more, trying to keep from becoming small and mean and pro _vin_ cial even as she felt the inevitable closing in round her. She thought she got free of it, with Ivan, but here it is again, staring her in the face, looking like the only person left in the world who knows what she is.

“All we did was fuck a couple times,” she says. 

Anger flashes across his face. But Mitchell’s never backed down for her either, and he can be brutal too: oh, she’d nearly forgotten. “More than a couple,” he says. “What is it now, five?”

“Well it’s not like we exchanged promise rings, is it.” She spits it out, then stares at him, daring him.

When he looks away it isn’t a surprise.

 

 

 

There’s this spot in the living room, on the far left side of the couch, where she can sit and look at the mural of the ocean and the white sand and the leaning palm trees and see nothing else. For half an hour or forty minutes at a time she sits there, staring at it, hating it, wanting it—the sand, the sea, the sky: paradise. But it doesn’t exist, that place. She can’t step into it and be happy, the way it suggests, and all staring at it gives her is a grey, hollowed-out feeling like hunger, like a hunger that is also thirst.

“Hey,” Mitchell says.

She didn't hear him come in, but suddenly there he is, his face shadowed, the smell of cigarette smoke clinging to him. “Hey,” she says. She thought he was gone, at work, or wherever he goes when he says he has work but doesn’t. The quay. A cafe, where perhaps he sits alone and drinks a cup of coffee and doesn’t look at anyone, or else stares at everyone with a look Daisy would recognize. She still doesn’t understand why he hasn’t kicked her out yet. There’s nothing tying them together but sentiment and a few months’ worth of shared history, the blood in their veins a shared weakness, a shared strength.

He sort of throws himself into the armchair across from her, legs sprawled out, his posture even worse than hers. George and Nina are rummaging about in the kitchen: footsteps, cabinets closing, the soft ebb and flow of voices. Daisy focuses on one of his boots, turning a ring round and round till the words fall out of her mouth. “I think I should leave. Go to Spain, or maybe Taiwan.”

Mitchell blinks. “What?”

“Someplace warm. Preferably with palm trees.”

“No, I mean….”

“I need….” That is, “I just—”

The knock that comes at the front door then is loud and assuming, urgent. Mitchell’s head snaps round, and even Nina—and then George—comes out of the kitchen. “What on earth?” Her hands are wet, but she goes to the door anyway, a certain caution in her movements that vanishes the moment she sees who it is. She fumbles the outer door open, says, “Jesus, come in.” 

Something in her tone of voice makes Daisy’s head come up. There are two of them, an older man and a younger one, and the second they come through the door she knows what they are. They bring in old smells—unwashed bodies and forest earth, and over that, over everything like a trailing fog: werewolf.

“Who’re these arseholes, then?” she asks Mitchell, making no attempt to be quiet. The older one looks vaguely familiar, like someone she might have spoken to once or twice on the street and then forgotten. He’s rough-looking, in a big jacket and old boots with even older laces. He wears his scars like they’re something to be proud of. He’s also bleeding. Nina’s supporting him on one side, the younger werewolf on the other; together they lead him over to the couch. 

Mitchell stood when they came in, and now he moves unsubtly away from them, toward Daisy. She didn’t expect that, but then, she’s turned toward him too. Closing ranks. “What’s this?” he asks.

The older werewolf glares at him. Clearly there’s no love lost there—and that sparks a memory in the back of Daisy’s head. Two vampire-hunter werewolves, Mitchell said that first day, bent toward her over the covers and the space Ivan’s death had left between them. His voice was low, afraid and frustrated even then, when they were alone. 

The younger werewolf looks at Nina. “McNair got himself stuck, runnin’ round in the forest, like. We can’t go to hospital, cause tonight’s a full moon, obviously, but I thought you could take a look at it, at least. You know, you bein’ a doctor ’n’ all.”

“I told you I’d be fine Tom,” McNair says. “I’ve had worse.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re very tough,” Nina says absently, leaning over the wound. It’s not bleeding much, and after a moment she sits back. “You really should go to hospital. But I guess I can bandage you up here, if nothing else. You’d survive changing on it, but I can’t recommend it.”

“Can’t he stay here?” The younger one looks at Nina, then at George, and then back at Nina, where his gaze sticks. “I thought you had a downstairs room for changin’ in.”

Daisy scoffs. “Are you serious?”

“Guests don’t get a vote,” says Nina sharply.

“Well I don’t want him staying here either,” Mitchell says.

“It’d only be for one night.” The younger werewolf—Tom, was it? Tim?—turns to look at them, and jesus, if “puppy face” wasn’t already a term…. But it works on Mitchell about as well as it’s working on Daisy; it’s only when George gives him an exasperated sort of look that Mitchell groans and looks away.

“Christ.”

“Don’t feel you need to do me any favors,” McNair says from the couch. His tone is dry and baiting. “I can see you’ve a full house as it is. Another bloodsucker, is she?” 

Daisy sneers at him. At the other end of the couch, George says, “McNair, why don’t we just—”

But McNair’s looking at Daisy, now. His voice is low when he speaks, but it’s the relaxed curve of his body that makes her mouth come open, that makes her teeth prick down but not extend, not yet. “Someone who’s been round as long as you probably have, no doubt we’ve taken out a few a’ your friends. Come on,” he says, chin tilting up, “gimme a few names.”

“Okay, _not_ helping.”

“Fuck you,” Daisy says. In the corner of her eye, George puts up his hands, but she hasn’t looked away from McNair. She’s seen him before, she’s sure of it, somewhere—

“Martin.” McNair’s gaze is steady. “Lawson, Kathleen, Helena, Bryant, Ivan—“

It’s not true. She knows it’s not; she knows Ivan died in an explosion in the funeral home, that this lowlife had nothing at all to do with it, that the name is a coincidence. But the hurt in her chest tears open, red and sharp and hot, more anger than grief, now, and she hurls herself forward. But she doesn’t make it to him. Someone is yelling; someone has an arm round her waist, holding her back with disgusting ease. When she looks up, she’s surprised that it isn’t Mitchell. It’s George. On the couch, Mitchell has gotten McNair back against the cushions with one arm pressed hard against his throat, and Daisy can hear the choking noises he’s making; she can see his lack of remorse.

“You say one more word to her, or to me, and I swear to god I’ll tear your throat out, you hear me?” Mitchell’s voice is low and furious, more Irish than she’s ever heard it. When he looks up, it’s not at George or even Annie, pressed nervously against the back of the couch; he looks at her. His eyes are dark and he all but spits her name out. “Dais?”

She doesn’t even know what he’s asking for: permission to kill McNair or let him go, acknowledgement of his mercy; maybe he just wants her to dare him to press a wee bit harder. It’s still an easy choice. McNair hasn’t done a thing to her in his entire life. She says, “Tear his fucking throat out.”

“Mitchell!” George’s voice has gone shrill with panic, but he doesn’t move forward to stop him. Maybe, Daisy thinks, cutting him a quick look, maybe he wants to see it as much as she does. But no. There’s nervousness and fear and a wee bit of anger in his face, and the anger’s not for McNair.

“Come on,” she says. “Come on.”

There’s a long, hungry silence, then Mitchell makes an ugly noise in his throat and slams McNair down hard against the couch cushions. But he lets him go. Then stands, and looks at Daisy. His shoulders are heaving. “It wasn’t him,” he says. His voice is so low and pained it cracks, and it’s that conscience of his rearing its head again, that desire, against everything screaming inside him, to do what he thinks is right. She hates him, suddenly, more than she can stand, and she doesn’t care that the people responsible for the explosion already died screaming, or that no one in this room had anything to do with Ivan’s death—she even doesn’t care that—she doesn’t—

“I know.” Her throat feels raw, stripped bare, somehow. She makes herself sound angry until she can’t anymore, until her voice breaks and she’s fighting tears. “I just—I want to see him suffer. _Some_ body has to suffer, Mitchell, because I can’t keep—I can’t—” She can’t keep going on alone. Ivan is dead; Pearl is dead. Daisy herself can’t be the only one to left to go on. Mitchell pulls her into his arms, and she clings to him like she hasn’t clung to anyone since Ivan. Mitchell’s shorter, but he holds her closer, so close she can feel that he is trembling too. Somewhere to her left, George is saying something, and McNair is saying something, and they’re leaving the room, the musky stink of wolf going with them. Then it’s just her and Mitchell and Annie. Maybe not even Annie anymore, but Daisy doesn’t open her eyes to check. Her face feels tired and her body wrung-out; once the anger recedes from her veins she just feels hollow.

Mitchell holds her until she pushes him away, and then he lets her go.

“I need a drink,” she says, wiping the tears away. “You coming?”

“I don’t—” Mitchell turns to look into the kitchen, but no one’s there. She can hear people walking round upstairs though, their steps clear and unhurried, their voices muffled, and that’s where Mitchell’s eyes go next. Then he looks at her. “Fuck it,” he says, and shoves one hand into his coat pocket for his keys. “Let’s get out of here.”

 

 

 

They go to a pub in town, a dark-paneled place with a mirror behind the bar and sections of stained glass between the booths. It’s a slow night, a Tuesday, but there are a few couples about and a trio of lads near the door. Mitchell picks a booth away from all of them, in the back, with a view of nothing but the exit. “Get me an old fashioned,” Daisy tells him, sliding into the booth. When he slides her drink across the table a few minutes later, she downs half of it in a single swallow. It’s a thin glass, fragile and light in her hand. She drops it back onto the table and traces a finger back and forth against the wet edge of it. In the front of the pub, one of the lads laughs.

“I keep thinking it’s gone,” she says. “The grief of losing him. I keep thinking I’ve gotten over it. And then there are all these things that remind me of him, fuck— _ev_ erywhere. There was this couple on the train here, holding hands, and I saw them and I wanted to tear their throats out. They were so in love. So happy together. I miss him so much, Mitchell.”

Mitchell his own glass in front of him, but he hasn’t had any of it yet. “I know,” he says after a moment. He gaze on her is careful and distant. “Eventually I think you just… learn to live with it.”

“Fuck that,” she says.

She finishes the rest of her drink, and rises to get another.

The barkeep looks Daisy up and down when she leads against the bar; it’s a look she knows. Usually she would return it, but she’s not in the mood for any of that now, the flirting or the lure, the quick two-step or the headlong tumble into the dark. “An old fashioned,” she tells him, and slides the bills across the bar. “Heavy on the whisky.” If she were here with Ivan, she would have ordered martinis and bright-colored drinks, things with cherries swimming at the bottoms of the glasses. But with Ivan, she was never drinking to get drunk. It was enough just to be out with him, seeing new things and listening to music and talking to people—talking to him. She doesn’t want to learn to live with the pain of his death and she doesn’t want it to fade, either. She wants him back. When that’s impossible, what’s left?

The alcohol works quickly, sending a singing warmth down her arms and legs; eventually she feels numb, weightless. Two drinks later she’s lying boneless in the seat, watching Mitchell stare at her with his head thrown back against the booth. Ivan looked at her like that sometimes, when he’d had a lot more to drink than Mitchell has—Mitchell’s been nursing the same dark pint the whole hour they’ve been here. It’s mostly that look, remembering that look on Ivan’s face, that propels Daisy up out of the seat and through the back door, ignoring Mitchell saying her name.

The night is clear and cold and her breath fogs a wee bit in the air. She feels instantly more sober—but not sober enough. She’s digging for her lighter and her cigarettes when a low _crunch_ draws her attention down the alley a bit. There’s a lad shifting through the bins across the way, back to her. He doesn’t see her. Doesn’t hear her. Doesn’t look up. Cigarettes forgotten, Daisy stares at him and thinks of all the other people she’s cornered in alleys and back rooms and is suddenly, mind-numbingly hungry.

She doesn’t even think about it.

She steps forward, wrenches him round by the shoulder, and sinks her teeth into his throat.

Nothing is clean close to the earth; nothing grew in the damp prison she found Cara in but mushrooms and monsters. The lad smells like shite beer and unwashed skin, and Daisy knows he’s homeless, or near enough. She usually has better taste, but—well. She’d lick blood off public toilet tiles if it meant she got to have it, although she’s glad, now, that she has to tear out somebody’s throat. She’s grateful for the violence. It’s easy to lose herself in the sweet dark warmth, in the muffled sound of the lad screaming under her palm. If Ivan were here, he’d smile his cool, small smile and step forward to join her, the way he had on that balcony in Italy, violence unfolding like a grand opera in the square below. If Ivan were here. 

If Ivan were here, he’d—

Don’t think about it. 

When the lad’s dead, Daisy lets him fall to the ground with a careless thump and lets the giddy rush wash over her. There’s nothing but the spinning darkness of the sky overhead, the rough brick wall at her back, the prick of her teeth still extended in her mouth. When the shadow of a body in the doorway appears on the street, just a few meters away, she pushes herself up and pitches toward it.

“Daisy.”

And then stops, uncertain, at the sound of Mitchell’s voice. The lighting out here’s shite, but she can still see his expression.

“Don’t look at me with that fucking look on your face,” she spits, reeling toward him across the cobblestone street. “You’ve no right to look so dis _point_ ed.”

Mitchell closes his eyes. “I know,” he says. He steps toward her. He holds out his hand.

She takes it.

In the house, when he hugged her, he was a strong thing to lean on; now he sort of folds himself round her, and lets her fold herself round him, her hands against his back, her face pressed into the space between his neck and his shoulder. Mitchell’s hands tighten in her hair, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. When they get back to the car, he opens the door for her and pours her into the passenger seat, and she lets her head loll back as he walks back round to the other side. The corner streetlamp casts golden light across the road; it catches in his hair and in the windshield in a bright slash. For some reason it reminds her of the night Ivan came back from driving Mitchell’s friend down to the docks, the way he looked as he stepped out of the car. Not haunted—not changed. But cooled, somehow. She wondered what Carl had said to him to make him look like that, like he hadn’t looked in all the time Daisy had known him. She still wonders, sometimes. There weren’t many secrets between her and Ivan, but there were things they never got round to talking about. Ivan had been alive for such a long time. And Daisy loved him, which had been enough.

The blood high has faded by the time she gets into the house. In its place is a sick nausea in her stomach and what’s left over from the drinks she had at the bar. Mitchell’s thrown one of her arms round his shoulder, holding her up, keeping the world from spinning too bad. She still goes down on the stairs. Drags him down too, in a tangle of elbows and knees and her palm pressed against his ribcage. The house is dark and quiet. Daisy wishes she could stay like this forever, in the moment before the words.

“I did love him,” she says, feeling the coolness of Mitchell’s skin beneath his shirt. “I did. I do.”

Mitchell hauls her up, and slips his hand round her waist when she stumbles again. “I know,” he says. “Come on. Let’s get you into bed.”

 

 

 

She wakes to rotten blood in her mouth and the weight of someone else’s foot slung between her ankles. Ivan. She smiles, a private gesture, a faint red tinge left where she presses it out against the sheets, from her lipstick or the blood, the ghost of a forgotten night. The lad in the alleyway, the glittering rush in the darkness. The stained glass panels in the pub Mitchell took her to. Mitchell. Someone is moving about in the hallway outside the door. Talking. Going up and down the stairs. “Nina, have you seen my house keys?” George calls.

“Jesus christ,” Mitchell mutters. He shifts away from her a wee bit, pulls the duvet up over his head. There’s an aching pulse starting up behind Daisy’s eyes, but mostly she just feels exhausted, with a grimy stickiness like she’s been awake for days and days, or slept for a year. 

“Nina?” George says in the hallway.

From the living room: “They’re down here on the little table!”

Thunderous footsteps on the stairs, a pause, then the sound of the front door slamming. It seems George is late for something.

When it’s quiet, Mitchell pulls the duvet down, but Daisy doesn’t look at him again. She can feel the weight of his body beside her, the weight of his gaze.

“How you feeling?” he asks. His voice is unaccountably gentle.

Daisy closes her eyes. “Like shite.” Usually, after she’s drunk a person dry, she feels better, but this is just a continuation of the slipping alcohol numbness from the night before. She’s reached the limit of her grief, and it looks like the edge of a cliff. She can’t go forward, but she can’t go back, either, as much as she’d like to. She’d like to turn round and walk back to that room in London with the boarded-up windows, where bombs fell and Ivan had just walked through the door. All these years later, and she’s just now realizing: he didn’t make her indestructible. Not really. Long-lived, yes, but the way she felt before Pearl, and George, and the open mouth of the scissor blades—that wasn’t indestructibility, just dryness. The dusty remains of a life she’d half forgotten, withered clean away. Loss upon loss upon loss. Trying to fill the empty space with blood and new places until it felt like she had.

“Those people we killed,” she says, “on that train. Do you regret it?” It’s not the question she meant to ask, but it’s what comes out. She’s been thinking about it a lot, actually, though it’s probably just being in Mitchell’s house that’s doing it. Lying in bed with him now, she remembers the last time she fucked him properly, under sheets slick and dark with blood, his eyes just as dark and hungry as hers.

Mitchell looks at her. “Every day since,” he says.

“Would you do it again?”

“In a heartbeat.” There’s a calmness in his voice that says he’s telling the truth—but then he pauses and says, “That scares me more than anything,” and that, too, is true.

She turns her head so she doesn’t have to look at him when he speaks, staring instead at the sunlight streaming through the gap in the curtains. At the house in Bristol, Mitchell had papered his window with red butcher paper, which had given the room a decadent, gloaming quality she’d rather liked. It had reminded her of the whorehouses in Amsterdam, the red light, the beckoning hands. Her body moving together with his.

“I felt wonderful, that next morning,” she says. “Like I could take on the world. We talked about it, do you remember?”

“Mm.” He stretches, looks at her. “Bonnie and Clyde.”

“I don’t feel like that now. He was the first person I’ve killed since I tried to bring Ivan back. It just didn’t feel right. Now I just—what’s the point, if it makes me feel like this? There’s nothing in it anymore.” Without him, she means, and knows Mitchell hears it. He doesn’t say anything, but she feels his eyes on her. “I can’t do what you’re doing,” she says. “I won’t go _clean._ ”

“I’m not asking you to.”

Maybe not. Maybe that’s the truth. Once he fought to get everyone on the wagon; once it was his entire reason for being, it seemed like. But something in him seems irreparably changed, now, and has ever since she found him living here in Barry, blood on his hands that all the washing up in the world can’t get him free of if he won’t let it go. It’s something Daisy has perhaps taken advantage of, matching their jagged pieces together to try to make herself feel whole again—but they fit so well. She fits so well against him.

“Taking me in,” she says, voice as disinterested as she can make it, “it’s not just because you feel like you owe Ivan for saving your life, is it?”

“What?” 

The look he gives her is baffled but sharp; she shakes her head. “Nothing. Forget I said it.”

“No, Dais—what the fuck?”

“I had to ask, didn’t I.” She leans over, presses her cheek against his bare chest and inhales the warm smell of his sweat and his body in sleep, the faint sweet tang of metal all vampires have, clean or not. There’s something that leaves you, when you die, when you change. There’s something that comes into you, too. But she’d been hungry even when she was human; that, at least, is no different than it ever was. “That werewolf,” she says eventually, “McNair. I kept thinking I’d seen him before. Last night I remembered. He was at the train station when I first came in.”

Mitchell turns his head toward her. “Coincidence?”

“I _really_ doubt it.”

“Fuck.”

Daisy sucks her teeth. “Mm.”

After a moment, Mitchell says, “He wouldn’t do anything here.” But Daisy can hear the doubt in his voice. He’s trying to convince himself as much as he’s trying to convince her. “He’s leaving today. I’ll make him, if he won’t go quietly.”

That from the man who was terrified, only weeks ago, that McNair would kill him. Who was convinced of it. “I won’t let him kill you,” she says suddenly, looking up. It’s a bad angle, but he tilts his head down, and she sees the darkness in his eyes. The velvet night. The monster he holds so laboriously under the surface, though he never quite manages to drown it. It doesn’t matter, though. That’s the part of him she likes best, the part that’s the same as what’s in her, and she won’t—she won’t—she won’t see him go too. “You’re not to die, do you hear me? You’re _not to die_.” She looks at him ferociously, feeling her lips pull back from her teeth and then further, into a snarl, until he nods.

“Yeah. Yeah, same to you.”

They lay in bed for another hour or so. When Daisy’s properly awake she takes a long shower, washes the last of the blood from under her fingernails; when she comes out, both the werewolves are gone and Mitchell’s burning something in the backyard. They’re the only ones home. Whatever it is he’s burning he’s doing it steadily, with a focus that tells her it’s not just rubbish. She leans against the doorframe in the kitchen munching on a bagel she found in the breadbox and watches him tear pages from a book—a big book, black leather with elastics wound round the cover, sticky notes poking up from the pages like some grunge neurotic’s wedding planner. They’re newspaper articles, mostly: accusations sprawl across the pages in thick black print. _Sick In the Head?—Victims’ Families Gather to Remember—_

Of course.

“You keep a lot of secrets from them, don’t you,” she says, and watches him startle and turn toward her.

First he looks terrified, then relieved. “Dais.” Then he turns back to the fire. “It’s for their own good.”

“You sure that’s not just what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?” she asks, eyebrows raised, stepping closer. It’s cold out, and she isn’t wearing any shoes; it doesn’t matter. “They’d leave you, you know, if you found out what you really were—what none of us can help being. They might not like it, but they’d do it.”

She tilts her head, studying the dark hunch of his shoulders. He looks the way he did when she first came here, when Nina opened the door and called him downstairs, all in black and looking like something had been carved out of him, some tender and essential thing. Daisy knows, now, what put such a look on his face. She knows now what he saw when he looked at her standing in the doorway. Someone broken. Someone lonely. She has never thought of herself as broken, but Mitchell projects; it’s one of his least appealing qualities. 

He had been—and is still, maybe—broken. But Daisy had been lonely. That, after all this time, is a truth she’ll admit to. _Ivan, Ivan, Ivan_ : the old bray of her once-beating heart.

Now Mitchell just looks at her and stares. After a long moment, he pushes a hand up through his hair and shakes his head. “I’m doing the best I can.”

Her laughter comes out in a huff, and fades quickly. She’s still smiling, though, when she looks at him. The pained look on his face, the torn-up guilt. “I know, babe,” she says softly. “We all are.” 

After a moment he turns back to the fire, and tosses in the rest of the book. It doesn’t burn right away, not with that leather cover, not with all those stickies and rubber bands; Mitchell has to stand there are watch it. Daisy steps closer, offering him the rest of her bagel. “Ivan used to say love was the only thing we really had. That it was the only important thing in the world.” 

“We lead long and appalling lives, but love makes them bearable,” Mitchell says, in a voice like he’s quoting something. Ivan, maybe, though it’s nothing Daisy remembers him ever having said.

“Something like that.”

The fire swallows newsprint in swathes of green flame, and Daisy catches more fragments of things before the paper curls up, black and ashy and fragile as a staked vampire’s skin. _Massacre—Killer or Killers Continue to Elude—Sick in the Head—Twenty Dead, Including—_ Daisy’s no stranger to seeing her exploits in the news, but usually they’re down under other names, heart attacks and muggings gone wrong and—the Lisbon coroner’s favorite—strokes. She lets her hand drop over the flame, close enough that her skin begins to sear, and then to blister. It doesn’t hurt. It never has.

“Ivan loved me,” she says quietly. “He loved me, and he wanted me—but he didn’t need me. I didn’t need him either, when you get down to it—not after the first while.”

She thinks of what George said in that hospital room, about her daughter being the last person who ever needed her—her, Daisy, that mewling human girl who would have fought for years without it making any kind of difference. Ivan was right. Daisy knows it now. She’s selfish; she wants what she wants. But George was right too.

“You sticking round, then?” Mitchell asks.

She runs her palm down the side of his face, scraping her fingernails over his unshaven jaw. She backs him away from the fire, into the kitchen; her thumb slips into his mouth like a fish hook. They’ve already slept together, more than once—this is no new bridge they’re crossing. The only significance to it is that now all of Mitchell’s housemates—Daisy’s housemates now too—know they’re here. It’s much different from the grubby anonymity she was used to with Ivan, the succession of hotels, of strangers’ houses with blood drying on the sheets. The last place she lived for more than six months was London, almost seventy years ago; she doesn’t know if she can do it again. But whatever rolled over within her as she knelt on her daughter’s chest hasn’t gone back to sleep yet, and she knows now that it won’t be leaving her anytime soon. She knows, too, that she won’t be getting anything back. 

And there is comfort to be found in the way Mitchell reaches for her, with more naked longing than Ivan ever did. Hers and Ivan’s had been an easy love, both passionate and distant, with none of the twisted desperation Daisy feels when she looks at Mitchell. She still wants to pull out his lungs, his spine, his bleeding heart and liver. She still wants to prove him wrong. Instead she kisses him, and pushes the heel of her hand against his trousers. 

“Do you need me?” she asks as he half stumbles, half lowers himself into one of the chairs. His hands are cool against her hips, sliding up under the edges of her blouse. 

“I do,” he says. “I do. God, Dais, I do.”

She settles slowly, deliberately, down onto his lap, pressing her mouth to his just to see the way his pupils widen, going black as the velvet dark of a starless sky.

“Long live the King,” she tells him, head tilted back, fox-sly and not meaning a word of it. His body is steady beneath her, more so than the look on his face, which has slid straight past desperation into awe and sharp-toothed hunger. It is easy, so easy, to lose herself in it, in him. She doesn’t even realize someone’s come into the house until one of the kitchen doors swings open.

“Mitchell, did you—oh. Oh. Shit, I’m—sorry, sorry, I didn’t realize you two were, uh—”

Beneath her, Mitchell groans. “Fuck off, George.” Then he presses up and keeps kissing her. But it’s no good—Daisy’s laughing now, hands pressed against the firm curves of his shoulders, mouth pressed to the side of his face.

“He always did know how to ruin a mood.”

“Jesus, don’t fucking tell me shit like that.”

She grins, letting her body go loose against him, sinuous and inviting. The laughter goes out of her. In its place: desire. She wants Mitchell. She wants the life he leads, simple and clean. “We should go someplace more private,” she purrs in his ear.

When Mitchell moves to stand, she slips off of him, and when he takes her hand she lets him. Through the kitchen, out into the empty living room. She thinks of this house, with its many rooms, its cheerfully painted walls, the mural of paradise in the living room. Mitchell's hand is warm in hers, and his smile, when he glances back at her, is wickedly sharp. Up, up, up, into the gloomy darkness of the upstairs hallway—into the uncertainty and hope of the future.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on [tumblr](http://furs-and-gold.tumblr.com/)!


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